B23-ScienceA.txt Graham L. Kendall Modified 10/31/2007 Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet/Dalnet as glk Files found at http://www.grahamkendall.net/ All are free to use any of this material without limit. ******************************************************************************* == Science does indeed require *evidence* for its facts and theories. But it does not require "proof". "Proof" is in the domains of mathematics and logic, and represents certainty. In science, there is never certainty. Any fact or theory may turn out to be wrong based upon new evidence. == Earth's water brewed at home, not in space Where did the Earth's oceans come from? Most scientists think they came from water-rich asteroids and comets raining down on the planet in its youth. But now planetary scientists in Japan suggest the oceans were actually "home-grown" they may have formed because the young Earth had a thick blanket of hydrogen, which reacted with oxides in the Earth's mantle to form lakes and seas. "Water is essential for the origin and evolution of life," says Hidenori Genda from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. "Why does water exist on Earth, where did it come from? These are fundamental questions for human beings." Scientists believe that just after the Earth formed, it was very hot and dry. Theory also suggests that millions of water-rich comets and asteroids bombarded our planet around 3.8 billion years ago, neatly explaining why oceans later appeared. What's more, the ratio of deuterium or "heavy hydrogen" because it contains a neutron in addition to a proton to hydrogen in our sea water matches the value found in water-rich asteroids, suggesting a common origin. But Genda and his colleague Masahiro Ikoma suggest another possibility. They say the Earth could have had a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, which reacted with oxides in the Earth's mantle to produce copious water. Thick gas Evidence for the thick hydrogen shroud comes from the Earth's orbit. Its orbit, like those of Venus and Mars, is very circular now, but models suggest it started out more elongated. If the planets were still submerged in a thick, hydrogen-rich solar nebula after they formed, however, the thick gas might have damped out any elongation of the orbits. If the water on Earth did form from a thick hydrogen atmosphere, however, it should have originally had a far lower value of the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio than we see in sea water today. But Genda and Ikoma have got round this problem. Their calculations show that the ratio would have naturally drifted upwards over time. Several effects would have contributed to this rise, including leakage of hydrogen into space. Energy from the Sun would have made most of the hydrogen escape, but the heavier deuterium would have escaped less easily, so it would have become more concentrated. Also, chemical reactions favour the gradual exchange of hydrogen in water molecules for deuterium. Genda and Ikoma conclude from their calculations that that the oceans might well have been chemically manufactured right here on Earth. "This is an interesting paper but in my opinion the results are not compelling," says comet expert Don Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, US. He points out that a gas-rich nebula is not the only way to 'circularise' a planet's orbit. "[And] as far as I know, there is no direct evidence for a large amount of free hydrogen . . . on the early Earth." Mars test "It's only theoretical, but it's a good hypothesis and I think it's very interesting for future research," comments Kathrin Altwegg, a comet expert from Bern University in Switzerland. "We might have to rethink theories of how much water the comets could have brought." She suspects the picture might be a complex one in which water came from chemical reactions on Earth as well as asteroids and comets. But Altwegg says much more observational evidence is needed to clarify our hazy picture of the solar system's early history. Spacecraft missions need to investigate deuterium-to-hydrogen ratios on planets, moons and comets at various locations across the solar system, she says. One intriguing clue could come from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, due to arrive on the Red Planet in May 2008. It aims to measure the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in Martian water ice for the first time. "It will be really interesting once we analyse water on Mars," says Altwegg. "It would be funny if Mars did not get water in the same way as the Earth." == Early Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe and Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating and magnetic stratigraphy indicate Upper Paleolithic occupation-probably representing modern humans-at archaeological sites on the Don River in Russia 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. The oldest levels at Kostenki underlie a volcanic ash horizon identified as the Campanian Ignimbrite Y5 tephra that is dated elsewhere to about 40,000 years ago. The occupation layers contain bone and ivory artifacts, including possible figurative art, and fossil shells imported more than 500 kilometers. Thus, modern humans appeared on the central plain of Eastern Europe as early as anywhere else in northern Eurasia. == The Devonian period contains continent scale Old Red Sandstone formation with a thickness in places of over 10000 ft. in England. ==== http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html big bang === Polar Dinosaur Footprints Found in Australian Outback Newly discovered footprints made by carnivorous dinosaurs in Australia reveal the ancient beasts survived in polar climes when the outback was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole. The discovery of the three fossil tracks, each about 14 inches (36 centimeters) long and showing two to three partial toe-prints, was presented by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory University, Friday at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Austin, Texas. The researchers estimate the tracks were made 115 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period by theropod dinosaurs, a group of bipedal carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex. And based on the tracks' size, Martin and his colleagues estimate the beasts stood 4.6 to 4.9 feet (1.4 to 1.5 meters) at the hip. While not half-pints, the dinosaurs would've been about 20 percent smaller than Allosaurus, a large theropod from the Jurassic Period. Martin spotted two of the tracks in February 2006 at the Flat Rocks site near Melbourne, and a year later at the same dig site, Tyler Lamb, an undergraduate student at Monash University in Melbourne, uncovered the third track. == 1000 tons of space dust falls on the earth each year. == Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. Ray Kurzweil (Paperback - Sep 26, 2006) == Robert Sungenis' 'Galileo Was Wrong' 'The Earth is not Moving Marshall Hall about Galileo === Type II supernova, which scientists think typically occurs when the core of a massive star collapses under its own weight, triggering an explosion. == New Telomere Discovery Could Help Explain Why Cancer Cells Never Stop Dividing Science Daily - A group working at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in collaboration with the University of Pavia has discovered that telomeres, the repeated DNA-protein complexes at the end of chromosomes that progressively shorten every time a cell divides, also contain RNA. A human metaphase stained for telomeric repeats. DAPI stained chromosomes are false-colored in red, telomeres are in green. This discovery, published in Science Express, calls into question our understanding of how telomeres function, and may provide a new avenue of attack for stopping telomere renewal in cancer cells. Inside the cell nucleus, all our genetic information is located on twisted, double stranded molecules of DNA which are packaged into chromosomes. At the end of these chromosomes are telomeres, zones of repeated chains of DNA that are often compared to the plastic tips on shoelaces because they prevent chromosomes from fraying, and thus genetic information from getting scrambled when cells divide. The telomere is like a cellular clock, because every time a cell divides, the telomere shortens. After a cell has grown and divided a few dozen times, the telomeres turn on an alarm system that prevents further division. If this clock doesn't function right, cells either end up with damaged chromosomes or they become "immortal" and continue dividing endlessly -- either way it's bad news and leads to cancer or disease. Understanding how telomeres function, and how this function can potentially be manipulated, is thus extremely important. The DNA in the chromosome acts like a sort of instruction manual for the cell. Genetic information is transcribed into segments of RNA that then go out into the cell and carry out a variety of tasks such as making proteins, catalyzing chemical reactions, or fulfilling structural roles. It was thought that telomeres were "silent" -- that their DNA was not transcribed into strands of RNA. The researchers have turned this theory on its head by discovering telomeric RNA and showing that this RNA is transcribed from DNA on the telomere. Why is this important" In embryonic cells (and some stem cells), an enzyme called telomerase rebuilds the telomere so that the cells can keep dividing. Over time, this telomerase dwindles and eventually the telomere shortens and the cell becomes inactive. In cancer cells, the telomerase enzyme keeps rebuilding telomeres long past the cell's normal lifetime. The cells become "immortal", endlessly dividing, resulting in a tumor. Researchers estimate that telomere maintenance activity occurs in about 90% of human cancers. But the mechanism by which this maintenance takes place is not well understood. The researchers discovered that the RNA in the telomere is regulated by a protein in the telomerase enzyme. Their discovery may thus uncover key elements of telomere function. "It's too early to give yet a definitive answer," to whether this could lead to new cancer therapies, notes Joachim Lingner, senior author on the paper. "But the experiments published in the paper suggest that telomeric RNA may provide a new target to attack telomere function in cancer cells to stop their growth." Joachim Lingner is an Associate Professor at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne). Funding for this research was provided in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation NCCR "Frontiers in Genetics". Article: "Telomeric Repeat Containing RNA and RNA Surveillance Factors at Mammalian Chromosome Ends" == The new VLBA measurements show the Orion Nebula's distance is 11,270 light-years away. == Neutron mass greater than H atoms by 782 keV. === In the Brain,there are 100 billion neurons, which are connected to each other via multiple synapses (around 3000 synapses per neuron). These neurons can fire in very intricate ways, thereby setting up incredibly complicated patterns. == Sir Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind; The Shadows of the Mind(1994) The Large, the Small and the Human Mind == Evolution of the Earth (Paperback) by Donald R. Prothero, Jr., Robert H. Dott, Donald Prothero, Jr., Robert Dott Bringing Fossils To Life: An Introduction To Paleobiology (Paperback) by Donald R. Prothero (Author) Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (Hardcover) by Donald R. Prothero (Author), Carl Buell (Illustrator) === Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) made very accurate measurements of the planets' positions over several decades. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) derived from these data three planetary laws, which formed the basis for Newton's brilliant work, which in turn formed the basis for Einstein's brilliant work. But, it all started with numerous, accurate measurements in the real world. === In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. == The oldest dated zircons date from about 4.4 Billion years ago - very close to the hypothesized time of the Earth's formation. The Greenland sediments include banded iron beds. They contain possibly organic carbon and quite possibly indicate that photosynthetic life had already emerged at that time. The oldest known fossils (from Australia) date to 3.5 billion years of age. == During the Permian all the world's land masses joined together into a single supercontinent, Pangea. The collision between Laurasia and Siberia-Kazakhstania and China finalized assembly of Pangaea by end of Permian. This was the first time since the late Proterozoic supercontinent of Rodinia that such a landmass had formed. Pangea was shaped sort of like a giant Pacman, with the mouth on the east. There was a correspondingly large single ocean, called Panthalassa. The body of water enclosed by the pacman mouth constituted a smaller sea, the Tethys, which covered much of what is now southern and central Europe. http://www.palaeos.com/Paleozoic/Permian/Permian.htm == George P. Hansen, in _The Trickster and the Paranormal_ == The Late Heavy Bombardment about 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, which gouged out 50 or so giant basins still visible on the lunar surface. Astronomers suspect it occurred when the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn shifted, with the gravitational pull of these giant planets hurling more asteroids and comets around. All the inner planets likely got hit at the same epoch as well--Foing estimated Earth suffered 25 or 30 times more impacts than the moon. Scientists aren't quite certain when the Late Heavy Bombardment occurred and how long it lasted, but it apparently took place around when life arose on Earth. == Tom Bethell The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Seeing in the Dark : How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe (Paperback) by Timothy Ferris == A virus (from the Latin noun virus, meaning toxin or poison) is a sub-microscopic particle (ranging in size from 20300 nm) that can infect the cells of a biological organism. Viruses can replicate themselves only by infecting a host cell. They therefore cannot reproduce on their own. === An onion (far less complex than a mammal) has about 12 times the amount of DNA than humans do. Some single celled amoebas have over 200 times our DNA code. The Microverse, edited by Byron Preiss and William R. Alschuler William Dunham's Journey Through Genius Alan Lightman's Great Ideas in Physics Isaac Asimov's Great Ideas of Science Jacob Bronowski's Science and Human Values Martin Goldstein's How We Know The Ring of Truth by Philip and Phylis Morrison === Rationalist books ----- An Anatomy of Skepticism An Illusion of Harmony, Science and Religion in Islam Adventure Lessons: Teaching of an Existential Vagabond An Evolutionist Deconstructs Creationism A Somewhat Sceptical Philosophy Affirmations: Joyful and Creative Exuberance And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia 1917-1929 Artificial Minds Brain & Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics Dare to Think for Yourself: A Journey from Faith to Reason Developing a Universal Religion: Why one is Needed and How it might be Obtained Father, In a Far Distant Time I Find You Fear Faith Fact Fantasy Fifty Nifty Ways to Help Your Child Become a Better Learner Genesis 2.0 - The Search for the Truth Continues God, The Devil and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory God.com: A Deity for the New Millennium God's Brothel: The extortion of sex for salvation... Heretics: The Bloody History of The Christian Church History: Fiction or Science Hope's Fool: A Grandfather's Millennium Notebook Human Evolutionary Biology: Human Anatomy and Physiology from an Evolutionary Perspective Hypoic's Handbook: The Evolutionary Origin, Genetic Blueprint, and Neurophysiological Foundation of Addiction: Hypoism In Darwin's Image Landmines of the Mind: One Thousand Asseverations, Surmises, and Questions about the Design of the Universe and the Meaning of LifeMassa Damnata Nonbelief & Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God Our Almost Impossible Universe: Why the Laws of Nature Make the Existence of Humans Extraordinarily Unlikely One Nation Under God Outside, Looking In Psychological Foundations of Success: A Harvard-Trained Scientist Separates the Science of Success from Self-Help Snake Oil Reading The Bible: Intention, Text, Interpretation Reality Essays, Differential Reality and Belief Scenario: Nascent Christianity Emerges Science and Nonbelief Second Genesis: A Science Thriller Seeking Truth: Living with Doubt Secular Wholeness: A Skeptic's Paths to a Richer Life Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism Scenario: Nascent Christianity Emerges: A Carefully Researched Novel Set in the Late First Century of the Common Era The Cosmic Force, an intriguing investigation The Essence of Humanism: Free Thought versus Religious Belief The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science The Numinous Legacy (Modern Cosmology and Religion) The Mystery of the Seance, the force of belief Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't The Person of the Millennium: The Unique Impact of Galileo on World History Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind Wisdom In Perspective == Principle of Competitive Exclusion, previously studied by Alfred Lotka, Vito Volterra, and Charles Elton, is a pruning rule that implies ... the impossibility of two species occupying the same niche in a steady-state ecosystem. == Donald R. Griffen Animal Minds == The Pauli exclusion principle is the restriction that no two electrons in an atom can share the same four quantum numbers. === Scientists explain why stuff is matter All down to decay rates, it seems Miniscule differences in the way antimatter and matter behave may help to explain why the universe is dominated by matter, according to a group of scientists working on the BABAR experiment. The big bang should have produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter. The fact that our universe is so dominated by matter must be down to some subtle difference in the two substances. The research teams on the BABAR experiment have discovered tiny differences in the decay patterns of B and anti-B mesons, a phenomenon known as a CP violation. This is one of three conditions outlined by Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov to explain the observed imbalance in the relative quantities of matter and antimatter, and is not easy to find. The differences in the decay patterns that point to a CP violation are tiny: in this case less than 300 parts in 200m pairs of B and anti-B mesons. The BABAR experiment involves the Stanford Linear Accelerator's PEP II accelerator, which collides electrons and positrons. This collision produces exotic heavy particle and anti-particle pairs known as B and anti-B mesons. In turn, these decay into other subatomic particles, like kaons and pions. SLAC's Marcello Giorgi, who is also spokesman for the BABAR experiment, said that if there were no difference between matter and antimatter, both the B meson and the anti-B meson would exhibit exactly the same decay patterns. "However, our new measurement shows an example of a large difference in decay rates instead." Giorgi explained that the team has examined the decays of more than 200m pairs of B and anti-B mesons and found 910 examples of the B meson decaying into a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples of the same final state for the anti-B. This is what is known as a direct charge conjugation parity, or CP violation: you can read upon that here. "The new measurement is very much a result of the outstanding performance of SLAC's PEP-II accelerator and the efficiency of the BABAR detector," Giorgi said. "The accelerator is now operating at three times its design performance and BABAR is able to record about 98 per cent of collisions." == A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God. As long as the celestial sphere was generally regarded as the domain of the divine, the fact that mere mortals could not explain its workings could safely be cited as proof of the higher wisdom and power of God. But beginning in the sixteenth century, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton-not to mention Maxwell, Heisenberg, Einstein, and everybody else who discovered fundamental laws of physics-provided rational explanations for an increasing range of phenomena. Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place. If you're not swayed by academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery-the frontier that drives the economies of the future-would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. == Why is the sky blue?" So you explain about Rayleigh scattering and the fact that molecules in the atmosphere scatter photons with an efficiency that's inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. == Martin Rees' Just Six Numbers the basic forces binding the cosmos There are six key properties: 2 relating to basic forces, 2 to scale and structure, and 2 describing space. The term "number" here is important, as these are all dimensionless ratios and fractions. According to Rees the numbers are: 1) Ratio of electrical force to gravitational force (10^36) 2) Fraction of rest mass converted to energy when hydrogen fuses (0.007) 3) Ratio of actual density to critical density in universe (close to 1.0) 4) Ratio of gravity to antigravity (very small) 5) Ratio of gravitational binding energy of galaxies to their rest-mass energy (10^-5) 6) Number of spatial dimensions in our universe (3) == Stephen J. Gould wrote, "Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in the last century, but apples did not suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. "Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are NOT about the empirical world. In science "fact" can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. "Scientists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory natural selection to explain the mechanism of evolution. "Scientific Theories are structured so that they can be tested or, in a sense, are open to potential falsification, allowing them to be put under scrutiny by means of making predictions. If a Theory is falsified it is because of more facts being discovered. A theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. You can make predictions from what you would expect to observe by the Theory. YECism fails to be a scientific Theory partly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it does not become useful, scientifically." === "Finite and Infinite Games - A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" by James P. Carse ISBN 0-345-34184- 8, Ballantine, $4.95 === Science formulates laws in the sense of, generalizations based on recurring facts or events, inductive in nature, and always subject to change according to the preponderance and convergence of evidence. If science stops being self-correcting, it stops being science. ==[ Beginning in about 1348, very large numbers of people began to die from the Plague. Eventually it killed between 1/3 and 1/2 of the population of Europe. == The 19 year cycle is called the Metonic cycle after Meton of Athens (5th century BC) who discovered that 19 solar years equals 245 lunar months to within 2 hours. == Ranging has also improved historic knowledge of the Moon's orbit, enough to permit accurate analyses of solar eclipses as far back as 1400 BC. Continued improvements in range determinations and the need for monitoring the details of the Earth's rotation will keep the lunar reflector experiments in service for years to come. == Our Moon was born when a Mars-sized planet, usually called "Theia," collided with early Earth. The impact carved out a large molten chunk from Earth which eventually coalesced into the Moon. The identical nature of the silicon composition on the Moon and Earth suggests our planet must have already undergone the core transformations necessary to make the heavier isotope before the Moon formed about 40 million years after the start of our solar system. == Science feeds on mystery. Matt Ridley has put it: "Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on." Science mines ignorance. Mystery-that which we don't yet know; that which we don't yet understand-is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do. Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or "intelligent design theory" (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name. === The Second Law of Thermodynamics is generally given in English as: "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." (Clausius) or "A transformation whose only final result is to convert heat, extracted from a source at constant temperature, into work, is impossible" (Kelvin) == Most Distant Black Hole Discovered The most distant black hole ever found is nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth, astronomers announced today. The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope spotted the bright burst of light the black hole created as it sucked up nearby gas, heating it and causing it to glow very brightly in what's known as a quasar. The distance to the quasar, which sits in the constellation Pisces, was determined by measuring the amount of redshift in the lines of the quasar's spectrum, or prism of light. Because light is "redshifted" to longer wavelengths as an object moves away from an observer, the higher the redshift, the further away the object is-and this quasar had quite a large redshift. "As soon as I saw the spectrum with its booming emission line, I knew this one was a long way away," said team member Chris Willott of the University of Ottawa. Because the Big Bang is believed to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago, astronomers are seeing the quasar as it appeared a mere 1 billion years after the Big Bang, which gives them a unique view into universe's past. Sometime around the universe's one billionth birthday, the first stars and galaxies began to shine and ionized all of the hydrogen atoms in the universe (or removed an electron from each atom). The quasar's bright light illuminates the hydrogen gas in front of it, which lets astronomers see whether the atoms still have their electrons attached or not, which could help pin down the date of this momentous event. The quasar might also be able to help astronomers learn about the growth of the first black holes; the black hole powering this quasar is estimated to be about 500 million times the mass of the sun, which is thought to be unusual for an early black hole. "It is puzzling how such enormous black holes are found so early on in the universe ... because we believe that black holes take a long time to grow," said team member John Hutchings of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. The finding was announced at the annual conference of the Canadian Astronomical Society. == Since geomagnetic reversals have been well mapped back to 150 million years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_track_dating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-argon_dating Another example of a secondary dating method is pollen identification. Many plant pollens are unique to short periods of time (often a few millions of years but sometimes much less), so if you find them deposited with a fossil, you've got a pretty good date. == Catastrophic Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts An extraterrestrial object with a three-mile girth might have exploded over southern Canada nearly 13,000 years ago, nearly wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a major cold spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago. Research, presented today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Acapulco, Mexico, could shed light on major questions about the megafauna extinction, the demise of the Clovis people, and an abrupt climate change. "Based on the distribution of material, it looks like this impact probably occurred in southern Canada near the Great Lakes, over what at that time would have been a major glacier, the Laurentide ice sheet," said one of the presenters, Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Comet chemistry They couldn't find a distinct crater, suggesting the comet burst in the air rather than slamming into Earth. Even an airburst should leave its mark, so the scientists think the Laurentide Ice Sheet absorbed much of the impact. A much smaller object burst in the air over Siberia in 1908, flattening 800 square miles of forest Firestone and his colleagues investigated buried carbon-rich layers dating back 12,900 years and blanketing more than 50 areas that span from California through Canada and into Belgium. They found a slew of extraterrestrial markers, including nanodiamonds, which are formed by energetic explosions in space, elevated amounts of the rare element iridium and tiny capsules of glass-like carbon. "Glass-like carbon is essentially carbon that's been melted at very high temperatures," like those from a comet impact, Firestone explained. They also found elevated levels of the rare Earth element iridium that are too high to be from Earth. Mega die-off During the last catastrophic animal extinction, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and giant bears, died out. Scientists have debated for years over the cause of the extinction, with both of the major hypotheses-human overhunting and climate change-insufficient to account for the mega die-off. An extraterrestrial explosion could have triggered a wave of massive wildfires that reduced to ashes the mastodons of the day, say the scientists. At one site called Murray Springs in Arizona, a well-known Clovis site, the scientists found megafauna covered by the comet debris. "This black mat drapes over the bones of partially butchered mammoths as if somebody was in the process of working on these animals while they were actually killed," Firestone told LiveScience in a telephone interview. "And between this black mat and the bones of this mammoth we find this ejecta layer. So it's as if the [impact] event occurred right on top of these mammoth bones and then this black mat occurs on top of that." Once put out, the fires would have left a barren landscape devoid of food for any remaining animals. "I would argue that most of the megafauna either died or starved after this thing," Firestone said. "But certainly there must've been pockets of survival of large animals even mammoths that may have survived for thousands of years beyond that, ultimately to be hunted to death or whatever happened to them." Chill out The comet theory could also explain the abrupt plunge in temperatures during the Younger Dryas period. Presenters at this AGU symposium argue that the comet impact or explosion would have heated up the area, causing the Laurentide Ice Sheet to melt and send massive amounts of water into the Atlantic Ocean. The input would affect ocean currents, which are responsible for keeping the atmosphere at livable temperatures. Plus, the massive wildfires would have loaded the atmosphere with Sun-blocking dust, soot, water vapor and nitric oxides. The result would be the abrupt climate cooling. The explosion would have been life-shattering for humans living in North America, particularly near the Great Lakes. "It would have had major effects on humans," said one of the researchers, Douglas Kennett of the University of Oregon. "Immediate effects would have been in the North and East, producing shockwaves, heat, flooding, wildfires, and a reduction and fragmentation of the human population." Any Clovis survivors would have been driven into isolated groups in search of food and warmth. Kennett said archaeological evidence at the Clovis sites is "suggestive of significant population reduction and fragmentation, but additional work is necessary to test the data further." One thing is for sure, "It was a bad day in North America for those folks who were living there," Kennett said in a telephone interview. The evidence for a comet impact is substantial. "I think the fact that there's an impact is pretty definite. There are too many markers there for it all to be coincidence or happenstance explanations," Firestone said, adding, "What will be debated is whether the extent of the impact was sufficient for instance to kill all of the megafauna or whether other factors were also equally important." == Pinker "How the Mind Works", == 'Resistance to science' has early roots Stem cells, global warming, evolution, vaccination why do some scientific ideas push political and societal hot buttons? Proving that scientists can study practically anything, a pair of psychologists considered "resistance to science" as a subject in its own right. And they found deep roots, childhood ones, to some of the contention that increasingly crowds public discourse on science issues. Resistance to science is nothing new, of course. The Catholic Church condemned the astronomer (a poor one by all accounts) Giordano Bruno to death in 1600. Galileo famously received home imprisonment in the same era. In the U.S., the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," a battle over a Tennessee law that forbid the teaching of human origins, was the "Trial of the Century" long before O.J. Simpson ever took the stand. Today, we don't toss scientists on bonfires, of course. We have congressional hearings. Last year, climate scientists Ray Bradley, Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes, answered questions about their research funding from a congressional committee. Fights over evolution led to 2005's redo of Scopes Trial issues in a court case involving the Dover, Pa., school system. And stem-cell research has fueled prolonged political fights, figuring in the last three national elections and a recent vote by Congress to expand the number of human embryonic stem cell lines available for federal research funding, which faces a veto threat from President Bush. "Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas," note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. "This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning," the psychologists say. In the last three decades, studies of children show that they quickly pick up an intuitive understanding of how the world works, say the researchers. For example, babies know that objects fall and are real and solid (even though physics experiments show they are mostly made of atoms containing empty space.) "These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn," the review says. "To be scientifically educated means you have to pick up a lot of counter-intuitive beliefs," says Bloom, whose research centers on how children develop their ideas about the world. It's perfectly rational for people to rely on intuitive beliefs about the world, i.e. that objects fall down, rather than learning Einstein's theory of gravity, he adds. "Life is too short." The conflict comes when intuition conflicts with scientific evidence. Kids often have a lot of trouble understanding that the Earth is a sphere, the review notes, because common sense suggests things should fall off a ball. And college students surveyed believe that a ball shot from a curled hose continues to travel in a curved path after its exit, although a demonstration can correct this belief. One intuition that causes trouble for science is "promiscuous teleology," a natural tendency in children to see a purpose and design in everything, part of normal development in making sense of the world. For this reason, children in studies prefer creationist explanations for animals and people, studies show too. "A lot of scientific ideas are fundamentally at odds with religious ones," Bloom says. "Every religion in existence adopts dualism," a belief that draws a distinction between the mind (i.e. the soul) and the brain, he notes, a finding completely at odds with the basic evidence from neuroscience that the brain itself generates all our thoughts and feelings. The belief that thoughts and being arise from something besides a bunch of brain cells zapping one another explains much of the debate over the moral worth of stem cells, Bloom contends. An added childhood source of resistance is how we learn to defer to authority, the review suggests. Again it makes perfect sense to defer to those we trust in childhood, i.e. "don't cross the street," "don't stick your hand in the light socket," or "leave the dog alone." But in adulthood, who we decide to trust has a powerful effect on how we view science, says Bloom. This goes both ways, he notes. Many people who accept that natural selection and evolution are reasonable explanations for where species come from, can't explain the concepts, polls show. This "scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true," says the review. Similarly, when trusted religious or political leaders endorse an idea, people who view them as trustworthy will hew to their views, as demonstrated in a 2003 study in which, "participants were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it." So, there you have it. Resistance to science springs from a clash of experimental or observational evidence with childhood intuition about the world, coupled with what political or religious community we embrace. For scientists, the review suggests they need to show how they use evidence and observations to demonstrate their conclusions, in contrast to religious and political leaders. Scientists, who have struggled mightily to distrust childhood intuition, must understand that their way of seeing things based on experimentation, observation and debate is unnatural, Bloom adds. "We have to understand the idea that that supernatural or religious ideas are not the product of stupidity or malice, but are in fact, normal human nature." == Gould pointed out: "The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world." In other words, mathematicians are able to prove that 1+1=2, but they are not able to prove that 1 bean and 1 bean equals 2 beans, because "beans" are not a mathematical concept. === Supernova 1987A by Richard McCray == The New Tourist's Guide to the Milky Way Because Earth is located on the same plane as the Milky Way's disk, astronomers can't look down upon our galaxy to study it the way they can for others, like Andromeda. So for a long time, even basic things about the Milky Way, such as its shape and size, were difficult to determine. Astronomers came up with a variety of ways to solve this problem. They invented tools that see in ways human eyes can't, devised clever measuring techniques, and, as Moore suggested, they "travel." With penetrating telescopes, astronomers roam the entire universe, exploring billions of galaxies in their virtual spaceships. They take the lessons, some of them learned billions of light-years away and billions of years back in time, and apply them closer to home. As a result, our picture of the Milky Way is constantly changing as technology improves and astronomers learn more about distant galaxies. The current picture is richer than even just a few years ago as astronomers have filled in knowledge gaps and added new details. They've recently learned, for example, that the mysterious dark matter saturating our galaxy is actually "warm," and they verified by various indirect means the existence of a supermassive black hole at its center. Studies have also shown that the Milky Way is more massive, more crowded and its stars more lonely than previously thought. If our virtual travelers could then now fly home, approaching the Milky Way from afar and then soar to its center, here is what they would find. The galaxy's main disc is surrounded by a halo of old stars and globular clusters (shown in red) in this rendering. Credit: NASA The Milky Way is a member of a collection of more than 50 galaxies called the Local Group. In terms of space occupied, Andromeda, or M31, is the biggest galaxy in this posse, but the Milky Way is the most massive. Were an intergalactic traveler to approach the Milky Way edge-on, the first thing she would notice is a luminous halo made up of gas and stars enveloping the galaxy. The halo is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and 1,000 light-years thick. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km). This halo contains some 170 orbiting star clusters and about a dozen small galaxies. The gravitational tug of the Milky Way is so great that it can sometimes tear these passing satellites apart, stripping them of gas and even stars. One star cluster, Messier 12, is thought to have been robbed of as many as a million stars in this way. Orphan stars stripped from their parent galaxies and clusters form streamer-like "tidal tails" or else they linger in the galactic halo, where they intermingle with other lone stars. These other stars are mostly ancient, around 12 billion years old and older, and they don't rotate around the galactic center in any organized way. Orbiting satellites can also affect the shape of the Milky Way. According to one hypothesis, the strange warp in the Milky Way's hydrogen disk is caused by the movement of two dwarf galaxies-the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds- and their interactions with dark matter as they orbit our galaxy. Dark matter is an unknown sort of material that has never been seen. Astronomers know it permeates or galaxy and others because the collections of stars could not hold together without some other, invisible source of gravity. Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars. Recently, however, this number was upped by about a billion after the discovery that very old, nearly invisible stars had escaped earlier detections. The Milky Way is believed to contain four major spiral arms, all of which start at the galaxy's center, plus a number of smaller arms. Our Sun is located on a spur of the Orion Arm. Credit: NASA/JPL Most of the Milky Way's stars are concentrated in a main disk, which lately has been described as a series of disks, none of which are entirely distinct, but instead overlap one another. The largest is known as the thick disk; this disk is fairly flat and spirals like a slow-spinning hurricane because of our galaxy's rotation. Nestled within the thick disk is an even flatter disk of stars, known as the thin disk. The stars in this thin disk rotate even faster around the galactic center than those in the thick disk. Further in is yet another disk, known as the extreme disk, where stars and clouds of gas are moving fastest of all. Our Sun, which is 4.6 billion years old, is located 26,000 light-years away from the galactic center on one of the spiral arms. It is a location considered more suitable than others for harboring life, in part because the central region is too chaotic, and in part because the concentration of metals there is too heavy, and it's too light in the galaxy's outer fringes. The Sun makes one complete orbit around the galaxy about once every 225 million years. In contrast, stars near the galactic center complete a lap in a few million years or less. These stars as a group tend to be younger than the galactic average, most ranging in age from 1 billion to 10 billion years old. A galactic traveler nearing the center of the Milky Way will feel a greater pull of gravity as the ship approaches the densest and brightest part of our galaxy, a spherical region known as the central bulge. Things are much different here. Most of our galaxy is relatively uncrowded-the nearest star to our Sun, for example, is 4.2 light-years away. But roughly 10 million stars are known to orbit within a light-year of the galaxy's center. Recent infrared surveys with NASA's Spitzer space telescope confirmed that the Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar of stars within the central bulge. This galactic bar is believed to be made up of about 30 million stars, stretching 27,000 light-years from end to end. It consists mainly of old, red stars, which is one reason it stands out and can be detected. The galactic bar is thought to spin like a propeller inside the Milky Way center, helping to create our galaxy's unique spiral shape. Observations of other galaxies also suggest that galactic bars plays an important role in feeding the colossal black holes believed to lay at the heart of many galaxies, including our own. The Milky Way's suspected black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, and is thought to have between 3.2 and 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Recent studies suggest that all of this mass is confined, amazingly, to an area approximately 10 times smaller than Earth's orbit around the Sun. Sgr A* is also probably rotating, making one full revolution about every 11 minutes. Scientists haven't glimpsed Sgr A* directly but they infer its distance from the incredible speeds of the stars around it, which move 50 times faster than Earth orbits the Sun. The gravity required to keep these stars in such a fast, tight orbit is calculable, and the tiny area into which it must fit indicates that it has to be a black hole, experts say. While most black holes form from the collapse of massive stars, colossal black holes like Sgr A* are believed to have "co-evolved," or formed along with the galaxies they inhabit. According to this view, black holes are more than just indiscriminate and voracious gobblers of matter; they are forces of creation that help sculpt a galaxy's shape and distribute its stars. Our intergalactic traveler's journey through the Milky Way ends here at Sgr A*. The ship must either swerve away and make for other galaxies, or risk breaching the black hole's event horizon, the theoretical boundary beyond which gravity is so strong that no form of matter or energy can escape. There are still vital details missing in our picture of the Milky Way. Current models insist, for example, that our galaxy should have as many as a thousand dwarf galaxies buzzing around it, each with between 0.01 percent to 10 percent the mass of the Milky Way. Yet only a relative few satellite galaxies and globular clusters have been found. One hypothesis is that these missing satellites are composed entirely of dark matter and therefore invisible to current technology. Also, even though astronomers can predict that the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda and cease to be a spiral galaxy in about three billion years, our galaxy's origins is a story that remains largely untold. According to the best recent theories, the Milky Way and other large galaxies like it grew through a combination of mergers between small hot clouds of intergalactic matter and, over time, galactic cannibalism. Like many of the details about our Milky Way uncovered so far, the answer to this mystery will probably be found far from home as well, in young galaxies that are still forming and in distant ones where scientists have found new features thought to be important for galaxy formation and star births. == When Milky Way and Andromeda Collide, Earth Could Find Itself Far From Home If Homo sapiens can stick it out on Earth for another two billion years, our descendants may witness quite a show in the night sky. Researchers estimate that the Milky Way will collide with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, at around that timewell before the sun collapses into a white dwarf, perhaps destroying the Earth in the process. This close encounter of the galactic kind could easily kick our solar system to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and there is a small chance we might even take up residence in Andromeda, according to astronomers T. J. Cox and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The pair simulated the collision by estimating the relative speed between the two galaxies and the amount of gas and dark matter in the intervening space, which exerts a drag on their motions. Andromeda is currently 2.3 million light-years from our galaxy. Researchers know that the two neighbors are approaching each other at 120 kilometers per second, but they are far less certain of Andromeda's sideways speed. If moving fast enough to the side, it would miss us entirely. "I think it's very likely they will come together," Loeb says. "The issue is, will it be [in] three billion years, five billion years or 10 billion years?" == Gunter Faure Principles of Isotope Geology == Astronomers date star's birth back to nearly the dawn of time Astronomers have used a unique process to determine that a star in our galaxy is nearly as old as the universe itself. The star is 13.2 billion years old, while the universe dates back 13.7 billion years, according to the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO). A group of international astronomers used the ESO's powerful VLT telescope to measure radioactive elements thorium and uranium to determine the star's age. The technique is similar to carbon dating methods used in archaeology to measure time spans of up to a few tens of thousands of years, the ESO said. Astronomers, however, must work with much longer timescales, it said. "Surprisingly, it is very hard to pin down the age of a star," Anna Frebel, the lead author of a paper on the results, said in a statement. "This requires measuring very precisely the abundance of the radioactive elements thorium or uranium, a feat only the largest telescopes such as ESO's VLT can achieve," she said. The organisation said "this star very clearly formed very early in the life of our own galaxy," which is believed to itself have formed soon after the Big Bang. The star's name is HE 1523-0901. === Date of Great Pyramid 2566 BC == The link between the prefrontal cortex and violence was first revealed in 1848 in the case of a railroad worker, Phineas Gage, whose skull was impaled by an iron rod in an explosion -- damaging the front part of his brain. Gage survived the accident but his behavior radically changed, with his formerly respectful, sensitive manner replaced by an impulsive and aggressive personality. Medical cases since have linked violent tendencies to damage to the front part of the brain, Siegel said. A recent study shows children who suffer injury to the prefrontal cortex before age seven developed abnormal behavior, characterized by an inability to control their frustration, anger and aggression, according to an article in the journal Neuroscience. Neurologists believe the frontal region regulates and controls aggression and violent impulses. A brain imaging study of 41 murderers found evidence that in most cases the prefrontal cortex as well as some deeper brain areas, including the amygdala, functioned abnormally, researchers wrote in the Neuroscience article. In the case of the Virginia Tech gunman, a medical investigation would also have to examine if he suffered a deficiency in his serotonin system, said Klaus Miczek, a neuroscientist at Tufts University. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system and low levels have been associated with several disorders. "Brain sertonin is a transmitter that has been investigated more than any other transmitter when it comes to violent, aggressive activity," Miczek said. A number of drugs have proved effective in controlling violent impulses by compensating for serotonin deficiencies, said Siegel, citing prozac and lithium used also to treat schizophrenia. == THE CHOSEN: A new study finds that neurons compete to be in the lucky 20 percent that make a memory during learning or training activities. Remember the old myth that people only use 10 percent of their brains? Although a new study confirmed that bromide to be apocryphal, it did find that we may only use 20 percent of the nerve cells in our midbrain to form memories. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto monitored neurons in the lateral amygdalae (two almond-shaped regions on either side of the midbrain associated with learning and memory) of mice to see whether the presence of the CREB (cAMP response element binding) protein plays a key role in signaling brain cells to make memories. CREB, a transcription factor that typically increases the production of other proteins in cells, is believed to be involved in memory formation in organisms from sea slugs to humans. Scientists hope that their findings, reported in the current issue of Science, may help pave the way to new treatments for Alzheimer's Disease. Researchers injected a vector designed to return CREB production to normal in mice that had been genetically modified to underproduce the protein. After being injected, these mice, who also were memory-impaired, performed as well as normal mice in memory tests. During the trials, researchers played a sound and then shocked the animals; when the sound was played again, normal mice and those with rescued CREB function frozefor a certain[short? ] period of timea reaction typical of fear. When the researchers later dissected the mice's brains, they found that the fluorescent probes they had attached to the CREB vectors showed they had affected only about 20 percent of the neurons in the lateral amygdala. "That surprised us. We thought that we would have to affect a lot more neurons in order to see a big change in memory," says study co-author Sheena Josselyn, a neurophysiologist at The Hospital for Sick Children. "Not all [neurons] participate in every memory. Maybe we're biasing these neurons to participate in this memory and [CREB is] all you need'' to compel it." To determine if the CREB-producing cells were involved, the scientists then tried to follow the memory-making process by inserting a probe, which would give off a fluorescent tag if RNA from a gene known as Arc had recently been transcribed in brain cells. Arc levels are normally low in a cell but increase considerably when neuronal activity has taken place. The RNA is transcribed in the nucleus of a cell and then transported through the cell's body to its dendrite, the projection of the neuron that receives information from other cells. "Arc RNA provides a really good molecular marker of when this neuron was active," says Josselyn. She adds that if the team found RNA in the nucleus of neurons immediately after a training event, they knew cells had been active within the last five minutes; if the probe was in the dendrite, they estimated activity had taken place 20 minutes earlier. The team found CREB-enabled nuclei to be three times more likely to have the Arc signature in them than nuclei in CREB-impaired neurons. The researchers also tested normal mice that were injected with a vector that would selectively decrease CREB function in some of their neurons. After running the fear-training trials again, they noticed that the mice learned normally, suggesting that the neurons unaffected by the CREB-reducing vector were still producing enough CREB to make the memories. The results: the memory trace, signified by Arc, showed that activity had taken place in 20 percent of neurons. "We think that it's really a competition, that neurons are really battling it out" amongst each other to be involved in the memory-making process, says Josselyn. "It's like grading on a curve the same number [20 percent] of students are going to get As"or in this case help make the memory. It is the same percentage, but not the same neurons, however, that create each memory. Also, researchers are not certain what causes naturally boost CREB function and, therefore, the likelihood of any particular neuron participating in making a memory. But Josselyn speculates that the brain likely "differentiates different memories by having different neurons encode them." In the future, Josselyn says, this mechanism could be harnessed to produce a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease. "In time, we're going to have some sort of neuron-replacement therapy for Alzheimer's, " she says, conceding, "It's a little sci-fi right now." But, if new neurons are inserted into a damaged brain, modulating CREB function could help bias the healing brain to use the functioning neurons and not its injured population. == Did the universe just get 15 percent larger? Astronomers question the accuracy of a key figure used to calculate the distance of faraway galaxies. Trust but verify. That little piece of strategy that Ronald Reagan applied to the measurement of nuclear stockpiles during the cold war is being used by astronomers. When measuring the size and age of the universe, astronomers have relied on the "Hubble constant," named after the late American astronomer Edwin Hubble. The constant relates a galaxy's distance to the speed at which it's moving away from us. Astronomers determine a galaxy's speed by looking at its light. The redder the light, the faster the speed. Divide that speed by the Hubble constant, and you get the galaxy's distance from Earth. As Max Bonamente at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has explained, "astronomers absolutely need to trust this number because we use it for countless calculations." Attempts to verify that number, however, don't yet support that level of trust. This high-stakes need for verification has energized a painstaking effort to refine the Hubble constant. Fritz Benedict and Barbara McArthur at the University of Texas in Austin led the international team that published their attempt to refine this number in this month's Astronomical Journal. To verify the Hubble constant, astronomers compare the distance they get using the constant against the distance they get from an independent measurement based on Cepheid variable stars. A Cepheid's light varies with time. This variation reflects the star's inherent brightness. Once astronomers know this inherent brightness, or intrinsic luminosity, they can estimate the distance to the Cepheid by noting how dim it appears from Earth. But the relationship between a Cepheid's variability and its intrinsic luminosity has not been known accurately enough to serve to verify the Hubble constant. The international team worked largely with nearby Cepheids whose distance could be measured directly by geometrical means. Comparing these absolute distances with those indicated by the Cepheid's apparent brightness helped refine this relationship. The team had to take account of myriad errors. They include minute motions of the Hubble Space Telescope that made the observations. "We've been cranking on this since 1977," Dr. Benedict says. Now this picky picky work has produced a result that Benedict says "has excited me more than any [other result] in my 35-year career." Astronomers now have a more accurate distance-measuring tool to use wherever they can find a Cepheid. Last August, Dr. Bonamente and colleagues reported new distance measurements to 38 galaxy clusters ranging from 1.4 billion to 9.9 billion light years away. They used radio and X-ray observations to estimate the physical size of a galaxy cluster. Geometric triangulation then gave the cluster's distance. Their check of the Hubble constant confirmed its currently accepted value. But Kris Stanek at Ohio State University in Columbus and colleagues found that value in error. They reported last August how they measured the intrinsic brightness of a binary star system in galaxy M33. Judging the stars' distance by how dim they appear from Earth, they found it to be 3 million light years away. The estimate based on the Hubble constant's accepted value was only 2.6 million light years. The true value of the constant may be 15 percent smaller and the universe may be 15 percent larger and older than we thought. Astronomers will "trust" whatever they believe is the best value for the constant. But the need to verify remains. == With 12 times the mass of Jupiter, CHXR 73 B straddles the line between the largest planets and the smallest stars. The latter, called browndwarfs or "failed stars," don't have enough mass to sustain the types of thermonuclear reactions that keep larger stars alight for billions of years. == According to Wkipedia at the web page http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Plate_tectonics here is the current view on that issue: "The movement of plates has caused the formation and break-up of continents over time, including occasional formation of a supercontinent that contains most or all of the continents. The supercontinent Rodinia is thought to have formed about 1 billion years ago and to have embodied most or all of Earth's continents, and broken up into eight continents around 600 million years ago. The eight continents later re-assembled into another supercontinent called Pangaea; Pangea eventually broke up into Laurasia (which became North America and Eurasia) and Gondwana (which became the remaining continents). " == Two Curious Structures and an Evolving Volcano National Geographic reported evidence that an enormous meteorite struck ancient California more than 35 million years ago. A formation found buried west of Stockton, Calif., resembles an impact crater and contains rocks that appear to be 37 million to 49 million years old. San Diego State University geologist Jared Morrow presented preliminary details last month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. His team includes a high school senior, Samuel Spevack, whose geologist father first spotted the crater while examining seismic survey data for the Central Valley region. == http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/snovaet_c07/kirshner/ expanding universe great === << History is replete with those who can << imagine things that science is only now finding out to be correct. The thing is, it is good to imagine and propose ideas- but it is cheap. Very cheap. It costs nothing and Man is a creative and imaginitive critter. Virtually all ideas and speculations which we are capable of generating have been laid on the table and kicked about at one time or another. Which is fine- but you should not condemn or demean the people who take the time and trouble to make the sometimes hurculean effort to actually rigorously test these ideas and analyze the data to determine which of these ideas is true and which are just pretty fantasies. That sort of work takes much longer and demands much greater effort than simply dreaming up the ideas to begin with. == A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard- long (meter-long) horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur's horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches (centimeters) long above their eyes. Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, published the discovery in this month's Journal of Paleontology. He dug up the fossil six years ago in southern Alberta, Canada, while a graduate student for the University of Calgary. "Unquestionably, it's an important find," said Peter Dodson, a University of Pennsylvania paleontologist. "It was sort of the grandfather or great-uncle of the really diverse horned dinosaurs that came after it." Ryan named the new dinosaur Albertaceratops nesmoi, after the region and Cecil Nesmo, a rancher near Manyberries, Alberta, who has helped fossil hunters. The creature was about 20 feet (6 meters) long and lived 78 million years ago. The oldest known horned dinosaur in North America is called Zuniceratops. It lived 12 million years before Ryan's find, and also had large horns. That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan's find would turn up. == Geology of the Grand Canyon area http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Geology_of_ the_Grand_ Canyon_area Young-Earth Creationism and the Geology of the Grand Canyon by Jon Woolf Introduction: http://www.jwoolfde n.com/gc_ intro.html Part 1: http://www.jwoolfde n.com/gc_ rocks.html Part 2: http://www.jwoolfde n.com/gc_ canyon.html Summary: http://www.jwoolfde n.com/gc_ summary.html Strata of the Grand Canyon: Grand Staircase http://www.geocitie s.com/earthhisto ry/grand. htm Paleozoic Strata http://www.geocitie s.com/earthhisto ry/grandb. htm Triassic Strata of the Colorado Plateau http://www.geocitie s.com/earthhisto ry/grand2. htm Jurassic - Cenozoic Strata of the Colorado Plateau http://www.geocitie s.com/earthhisto ry/grand2b. htm USGS - Stratigraphy of Grand Canyon National Park http://3dparks. wr.usgs.gov/ coloradoplateau/ grandcanyon_ strat.htm USGS - Stratigraphic Units of the Colorado Plateau, by Age http://3dparks. wr.usgs.gov/ coloradoplateau/ age.htm The Geology of the Grand Canyon by Bob Ribokas http://www.kaibab. org/geology/ gc_geol.htm Grand Canyon Rock Layers by Bob Ribokas http://www.kaibab. org/geology/ gc_layer. htm Overview of Grand Canyon Geology and Rock Formations by Bob Keller http://www.rockhoun ds.com/grand_ hikes/geology/ overview. shtml The Grand Canyon Supergroup Formations by Bob Keller http://www.rockhoun ds.com/grand_ hikes/geology/ supergroup_ formations. shtml The Kaibab Formation http://www.rockhoun ds.com/grand_ hikes/geology/ kaibab_formation .shtml Stromatolite Fossils in the Hakatai Shale http://www.rockhoun ds.com/grand_ hikes/hikes/ stromatolites_ in_the_hakatai Grand Canyon Geology by The Resource Center for Environmental Education http://edu-source. com/GCpages/ CVOpage1. html == 3500 B.C. began with copper tools, then 2500 B.C. superior bronze tools, then 1200 B.C. superior iron tools. Retrieved from "http://www.conservapedia.com/Age_of_Metal" == Towering Ancient Tsunami Devastated the Mediterranean A volcano avalanche in Sicily 8,000 years ago triggered a devastating tsunami taller than a 10-story building that spread across the entire Mediterranean Sea, slamming into the shores of three continents in only a few hours. A new computer simulation of the ancient event reveals for the first time the enormity of the catastrophe and its far-reaching effects. The Mt. Etna avalanche sent 6 cubic miles of rock and sediment tumbling into the waterenough material to cover the entire island of Manhattan in a layer of debris thicker than the Empire State Building is tall. The mountain of rubble crashed into the water at more than 200 mph. It pummeled the sea bed, transformed thick layers of soft marine sediment into jelly and triggered an underwater mudslide that flowed for hundreds of miles. To create their computer simulation, researchers at the National Institute of Geology and Volcanology in Italy used sonar-equipped boats to survey seafloor sediment displaced by the Mt. Etna avalanche. Their recreation suggests the tsunami's waves reached heights of up to 130 feet and maximum speeds of up to 450 mph, making it more powerful than the Indonesian tsunami that killed more than 180,000 people in 2004. The researchers have also linked the ancient tsunami with the mysterious abandonment of Atlit-Yam, a Neolithic village located along the coast of present-day Israel. When archeologists discovered the village about 20 years ago, they found evidence of a sudden evacuation, including a pile of fish that had been gutted and sorted but then left to rot. "A tsunami was not suspected before," lead researcher Maria Pareschi told LiveScience. According to Pareschi, if the same tsunami struck today, Southern Italy would be inundated within the first 15 minutes. In one hour, the waves would reach Greece's western coasts. After an hour and a half, the city of Benghazi in Northern Africa would be hit. At the three and a half hour mark, the waves would have traversed the entire Mediterranean to reach the coasts of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Avalanches and minor eruptions still occur on Mt. Etna today, but so far, nothing approaching the magnitude of the ancient event. "Should the Neolithic Etna tsunami have occurred today, the impact is tremendous because the Eastern Mediterranean coasts are very inhabited ones," Pereschi said. == New Mollusk Species Found in Philippines A French-led marine expedition team believes it has discovered thousands of new species of mollusks and crustaceans around a Philippine island. Some 80 scientists, technicians, students and volunteers from 19 countries surveyed the waters around Panglao island, 390 miles southeast of Manila. "Numerous species were observed and photographed alive, many for the first time, and it is estimated that 150-250 of the crustaceans and 1,500-2,500 of the mollusks are new species," said a statement from the expedition team, which was led by Philippe Bouchet of the French National Museum of Natural History. "However, it requires a thorough comparison with all previously named species to ascertain if a novel species is indeed new to science," it added. "This is a slow and tedious process." The Panglao Marine Biodiversity Project turned over to the Philippine National Museum more than a hundred holotypes or representative specimen of the rare finds, officials said. The expedition team said its survey revealed over 1,200 species of decapod crustaceans - a group that includes crayfish, crabs, lobsters and shrimps - and some 6,000 species of mollusks. == Electron charge is 1.60217653(14) x 10-19 coulombs,[2] where the 14 indicates the uncertainty of the last two decimal places == 'Astounding' Findings Pin Down Age of Universe, Birth of First Stars Astronomers announced today a slew of remarkable findings about the early cosmos, including a firm determination of the age of the universe and the discovery of when the first stars were born. The discoveries, based on an all-sky map that is like a baby picture of the universe, were detailed at a NASA press conference. They provide the strongest support to date for the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe and a sub-notion within that theory that asserts that "hyperinflation" ruled during the first seconds. The results come from measurements of radiation emitted before there were any stars. The snapshot shows the state of the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The study of this so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) was made using NASA's space-based Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) observatory. The data were projected to a slightly more modern yet unseen era, revealing that the universe had cooled enough for matter to condense and form the first stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang. "That's a surprisingly early time for the turn-on of the first stars," said Charles L. Bennett, principal investigator for MAP at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The new data show the universe to be 13.7 billion years old, to within 200 million years, Bennett said. That figure has been estimated and re-estimated many times, but often with wide margins of error. Further, the study finds that early universe was 4 percent real matter in the form of atoms, about 23 percent unseen dark matter, and about 73 percent dark energy, a totally unknown and exotic force that causes the universe to accelerate at an ever-faster pace. Importantly, all of these figures are in line with other estimates made from data collected in the nearby universe. Bennett and others said the new results now serve as a cornerstone for modern cosmological theory and support its most widely accepted aspects. The results also confirm that the geometry of the universe is flat. This sort of geometry, the same as what's taught in high school, does not allow two parallel lines to intersect, even across great cosmic distances. Hyperinflation Among the more tantalizing findings is what appears to be the first observational evidence that, as theorized, the first seconds of the universe involved extremely rapid inflation. And data shows that some of the many inflation models -- each trying to explain how this rapid expansion occurred -- can probably be ruled out, while others may work. Andrei Linde, of Stanford University, developed some of the inflationary models that still seem to be alive. He had been greatly anticipating the results and in a telephone interview called them "extremely impressive." Linde said inflation had seemed like science fiction when it was first introduced, about 20 years ago. "We didn't expect in our lifetimes it would be verified," Linde said. "Now we hear the basic features of inflationary cosmology fit with observational data." The cosmic microwave background (CMB) was unleashed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had first expanded enough to cool and allow atoms to form. Around that time, a dense and impenetrable primordial cloud cleared out. The radiation escaped in one form and, over time, its wavelengths were stretched to the microwave range by the perpetual expansion of the universe. The remnant radiation retains an imprint of the end of that era and hints about what occurred before, much like the patterns on a cloud's exterior provide clues to its insides. The microwave radiation has since spread out and cooled, filling the universe. It appears to be of nearly uniform temperature across all of space, but minute variations first detected a decade ago provide the clues needed to help decipher the primordial structure of the universe. Tiny variations The MAP spacecraft launched June 30, 2001. These are the first findings attributed to it. MAP examines the CMB in greater detail than its predecessor, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. COBE first discovered the fine variations in the CMB in 1992. It took about 3 months to get MAP into position, and since then it has been building up the data that led to today's long-anticipated announcement. The temperature of the CMB ranges from 2.7251 to 2.7249 degrees Kelvin (a measure of degrees above absolute zero). These tiny variations reflect the earliest lumps and bumps in the universe -- seeds for galaxies and stars. These seeds, then, formed roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Scientists have no observations to tell them what happened next, but here's what they imagine: Nodes of matter were connected by long filaments, much like a spider web. Clumps of hydrogen -- something like drops on the spider web -- developed along the filaments. Each drop had heft, gravity and a random velocity, and eventually they were drawn toward the nodes, where material gathered to generate the first galaxies. Princeton University's David Spergel, co-investigator for MAP, said the new findings result from using the MAP data and running them against millions of computer simulations to look for matches of what the composition and geometry of the young cosmos must have been like. "It's a lot like matching fingerprints," Spergel said. Once a match is found, then a computer model can be run forward in time to see if things turn out to match up with observations of the modern universe. "What we find when we do that is remarkable," Spergel said. "It all fits." Crazy universe, but true The process is as daunting as taking a picture of a 12-hour-old baby and morphing it into an image of a 50-year-old adult, said John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Bahcall was not involved in the project. But he lauded the results. "I'm astounded," he said. Bahcall said the observations and analysis were so precise that they must be believed. "We live in an implausible, crazy universe, but one whose defining characteristics we now know," Bahcall said. The cosmic microwave background was detected by accident in 1965, by Bell Labs researchers who heard extra noise in a radio receiver they were testing. At the time, Princeton physicist David Wilkinson had been working on a way to detect the radiation. He helped write a scientific paper back then for the Physical Review, describing the implications of the inadvertent discovery. Wilkinson later helped develop the COBE satellite. He then worked on the MAP project. "Dave was really the father of MAP," Lyman Page, a MAP team member from Princeton, said late last year. Wilkinson died in September. NASA announced today that the observatory had been renamed WMAP, or Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The results announced today had originally been slated for a press conference last Thursday but were delayed in deference to the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts and their families. By any account, the discoveries represent a remarkable way for NASA to get its science program heading back toward business as usual. From speculation to science "Before the WMAP results, astronomers and physicists had put together a very implausible picture of our universe," Bahcall said. "It had a tiny amount of ordinary matter. It had a modest amount of dark matter, whatever that is. It had an overwhelming amount of dark energy, which is a strange beast. I have to confess I was very skeptical of this picture. But the WMAP results have convinced me." He added that every astronomer will remember when they first heard these results. "The announcement today represents a rite of passage for cosmology from speculation to precision science," Bahcall said. WMAP has more work to do, however, and it will continue collecting data. Paul Steinhardt, another Princeton physicist who was not involved in WMAP project but has reviewed the findings, said the results do not rule out a so-called cyclic model of evolution, which competes with the inflationary model. The cyclic model holds that instead of a set beginning to the universe, evolution is periodic. Both models predict virtually the same temperature fluctuations reported by WMAP, Steinhardt told SPACE.com. Inflation further predicts the generation of so-called gravitational waves, which should also be imprinted on the CMB. "That does not occur in the cyclic model," he said. Steinhardt said the WMAP data are not yet sensitive enough to address this unresolved issue, but further observations by the satellite or other projects might yield an answer. == The most detailed x-ray image yet of one of the youngest known supernova remnantsthe debris cloud created when a massive star explodessolves a long-standing mystery about how the star died. About 400 years ago people on Earth, including the famous German astronomer Johannes Kepler, saw the light from a supernova. The explosion was so bright that it was visible with the naked eye even though it occurred about 13,000 light-years away. Scientists have been studying what became known as the Kepler supernova remnant for about 30 years, but the formation had left them baffled about the type of explosion that created it. So far, scientists know of two types of supernovas: core-collapse and thermonuclear. Previous images suggested that the Kepler remnant is surrounded by dense material, as expected from a core collapse. But the formation also appeared to contain copious amounts of iron, a signature of a thermonuclear explosion. The new image, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, clearly shows abundant iron (yellow) and sparse oxygen, proving the Kepler blast was thermonuclear, said Stephen Reynolds of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "But at the same time we confirmed the presence of circumstellar material [red]," which is normally a telltale sign of core collapse, Reynolds said. The finding could mean that Kepler belongs to a new class of thermonuclear supernova, he added. But for now, Reynolds said, the image just shows that "it has both [features]. Live with it. That's Chandra's message." == http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galileoaccount.html Galileo history == Grand Canyon "Archeological Resources: The oldest human artifacts found are nearly 12,000 years old and date to the Paleo-Indian period. There has been continuous use and occupation of the park since that time. Archeological remains from the following culture groups are found in Grand Canyon National Park: Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Basketmaker, Ancestral Puebloan (Kayenta and Virgin branches), Cohonina, Cerbat, Pai, Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, and Euro-American. The park has recorded over 4,800 archeological resources with an intensive survey of nearly 3% of the park area. The rocks exposed within Grand Canyon range from the fairly young to the fairly old (geologically speaking). Kaibab limestone, the caprock on the rims of the canyon, formed 270 million years ago. The oldest rocks within the Inner Gorge at the bottom of Grand Canyon date to 1.84 billion years ago. For comparison geologists currently set the age of Earth at 4.5 billion years..." == Observationally, the lightest black hole candidates are about six solar masses. Going, Going, Gone? The realization that holes could be small prompted Hawking to consider what quantum effects might come into play, and in 1974 he came to his famous conclusion that black holes do not just swallow particles but also spit them out [see "The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes," by S. W. Hawking; Scientific American, January 1977]. Hawking predicted that a hole radiates thermally like a hot coal, with a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. For a solar-mass hole, the temperature is around a millionth of a kelvin, which is completely negligible in today's universe. But for a black hole of 1012 kilograms, which is about the mass of a mountain, it is 1012 kelvins--hot enough to emit both massless particles, such as photons, and massive ones, such as electrons and positrons. Because the emission carries off energy, the mass of the hole tends to decrease. So a black hole is highly unstable. As it shrinks, it gets steadily hotter, emitting increasingly energetic particles and shrinking faster and faster. When the hole shrivels to a mass of about 106 kilograms, the game is up: within a second, it explodes with the energy of a million-megaton nuclear bomb. The total time for a black hole to evaporate away is proportional to the cube of its initial mass. For a solar-mass hole, the lifetime is an unobservably long 1064 years. For a 1012-kilogram one, it is 1010 years--about the present age of the universe. Hence, any primordial black holes of this mass would be completing their evaporation and exploding right now. Any smaller ones would have evaporated at an earlier cosmological epoch. == http://www.wmnh. com/wmas0002. htm Pierre and Marie Curie (1867-1934) discovered radium (1898) which led to a new tool (measuring radioactive decay) for absolute dating of certain rocks. In 1903 they discovered that radioactive decay produces heat as a by-product. This invalidated Lord Kelvin's calculations since it introduced a new heat source that Kelvin had not accounted for. Geologists no longer had to assume that the Earth had steadily cooled from a molten state. The fuel of plutonism had been clearly identified. Bertram Boltwood (1907) dated the Earth's age as somewhere between 400 million and 2.2 billion years using the radioactive decay method. Joseph Barrell (1917) reinterpreted geologic history to conform with the latest results of radioactive dating. Even though these results indicated an age of a few billion years, many geologists still preferred the 100 million year old Earth. George Ashley (1923) published A Geologic Time Scale while serving as state geologist of Pennsylvania. At this point, Earth's geologic history was already divided into Paleozoic(400 million years duration), Mesozoic(150 million years) and Cenozoic(61 million years). [Current revisions are approximately 360 million, 185 million and 65 million years respectively. ] Arthur Holmes (1926) was the primary author of a report for the National Academy of Sciences in which the committee agreed unanimously that radioactive dating was the only reliable geologic timescale. By this time, the constants of radioactivity were firmly established and other sources of problems such as specimen selection and lead isotopes were understood. The scale has been further refined over the last 70 years. Currently, the record for the oldest known rocks on Earth is 3.96 billion years. Harry Hess (1960) placed sea-floor spreading on firm theoretical and empirical footing. The modern study of plate tectonics is born. Alvarez et. al. (1980) proposed a major asteroid or comet impact at the K/T boundary which was probably the major causative agent of the K/T mass extinction. The Alvarez hypothesis sparked interest in searching for similar evidence at other extinction horizons. Eugene Shoemaker (1983) tabulated lists of Earth crossing asteroids and comets and calculated cratering rates for Earth. Harland et. al. (1989) published A Geologic Time Scale which is considered an authoritative work on on the geologic timescale and is widely used by geologists and paleontologists. D. McLaren and W. Goodfellow (1990) presented a model for the environmental effects of large asteroid and comet impacts and some evidence for large impact events at most of the major extinction horizons. === In proper science there are only "better" theories, never absolute truths. == Geological periods Eon Era Period Start, Million Years Ago Phanerozoic Cenozoic Neogene* (Miocene/Pliocene/Pleistocene/Holocene) 23.0 Paleogene (Paleocene/Eocene/Oligocene) 65.5 Mesozoic Cretaceous 145.5 Jurassic 200 Triassic 251 Paleozoic Permian 300 Carboniferous (Mississippian/Pennsylvanian) 359 Devonian 416 Silurian 444 Ordovician 488 Cambrian 542 Proterozoic Neoproterozoic Ediacaran 630 == "In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world." -- Jelaleddin Rumi == Carving Grand Canyon by geologist Wayne Ranney or The Colorado River: Origin and Evolution, == More than six and a half million compounds of the element carbon, many times more than those of any other element, are known, and more are discovered and synthesized regularly. Hundreds of carbon compounds are commercially important but the element itself in the forms of diamond, graphite, charcoal, carbon black, and fullerene is also indispensable. === In the Coconino sandstone are the numerous appearances of clearly defined lizard tracks going up the side of one dune and down the other? Snake and beetle trails are so distinct and characteristic that sometimes the species can be identified? These occur all through the Coconino, top to bottom. == Big Bang First was the discovery of red shift by astronomer Fred Hoyle. He discovered that light was red-shifted, which is the light equivalent of the Doppler effect in sound waves. The only reasonable explanation for this phenomenon that anyone has come up with is that everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. If everything is moving away from everything else, then it's a simple matter to reverse the movement in your imagination and you will realize that there comes a time when everything was in the same place at the same time. This is called the singularity. It was from the singularity that the Big Bang came. Second was the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. George Gamow, a famous theoretical physicist, speculated that, if the Big Bang were true, then we should see a uniform radiation residue of the event, everywhere in the universe. Such radiation had not before been observed, but, within 10 years of Gamow's speculation, the Microwave Background Radiation was discovered and it's temperature was measured to be within a few degrees Kelvin of Gamow's prediction. Third was the initial finding that the Microwave Background Radiation was homogeneous to a high degree. That meant that it seemed to be the same everywhere. In fact, it seemed to be so much the same that physicists began to be concerned. How could stars and galaxies have begun to form if the background radiation showed no "blips"? It was definitely felt that gravity needed some small difference to get started forming stars and galaxies, but they weren't seeing any. Finally, using the COBE satellite, they were able to see the "blips" they felt had to be there if the Big Bang were to be true. === Universe's First Objects Possibly Seen Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun. The alternative is just as interesting: The objects might be early black holes consuming gas voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form. The observations, by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, were first reported on a preliminary basis in November 2005 in the journal Nature. A new analysis was announced today. "We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collections of objects," said Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author on two reports to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today." Way back The light comes from objects that are more than 13 billion light-years away. That means the light began its journey more than 13 billion years ago. The universe is just a smidgeon older, at 13.7 billion years, and astronomers are pretty sure it took a few hundred million years for the matter of the Big Bang to spread out enough, and cool, to allow the first stars to form. A little math therefore shows that these newfound objects are indeed the infants of the universe. But what are they? If they are stars, they are about 10 times more massive than theories suggest the first stars would have been. The mysterious objects are in clusters. If they are each stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. And if so, each apparently has a mass that's less than a million suns. Our Milky Way, by contrast, holds the mass of about 100 billion suns and is thought to have been built up by mergers of smaller galaxiesperhaps like those the astronomers now think they might be seeing. What they see When light travels to us from near the beginning of the universe, it is stretched. Other observations of the universe's first light have been made in the microwave range. This cosmic microwave background reveals patterns of matter clumping, but no specific objects. The light measured in the new study is thought to have started as ultraviolet and optical light, and it has been stretched over time to infrared. Kashlinsky's team calls it the cosmic infrared background and describes it as a diffuse light from the early time when structure first emerged. "There's ongoing debate about what the first objects were and how galaxies formed," said Harvey Moseley of Goddard, a co-author on the new papers. Some think our galaxy and other large galaxies grew through mergers. One recent study questioned that notion, however. "We are on the right track to figuring this out," Moseley said. "We've now reached the hilltop and are looking down on the village below, trying to make sense of what's going on." Difficult observations The problem in making sense of it all lies with the fact that the observations are not clear-cut. The scientists had to remove light from foreground stars and galaxies, and then study fluctuations in what is a relatively diffuse light "Imagine trying to see fireworks at night from across a crowded city," Kashlinsky suggested. "If you could turn off the city lights, you might get a glimpse at the fireworks. We have shut down the lights of the universe to see the outlines of its first fireworks." The researchers expect NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope will be able to identify the nature of the newfound clusters. == The earliest Neandertals date from 225,000 years ago at Pontnewydd cave in Wales and at Ehringsdorf, Germany about the same time. (Stringer and Gamble, 1993, p. 66) == "The Ethical Basis of Science" Science. Vol. 150. 1965, p. 1254. [Q1 S35] == Bertrand Russell said, "Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science..." Richard Feynman said, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled...I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." === The Moon is moving away from us. Each year, the Moon steals some of Earth's rotational energy, and uses it to propel itself about 3.8 centimeters higher in its orbit. Researchers say that when it formed, the Moon was about 14,000 miles (22,530 kilometers) from Earth. It's now more than 280,000 miles, or 450,000 kilometers away. All this tugging has another interesting effect: Some of Earth's rotational energy is stolen by the Moon, causing our planet to slow down by about 1.5 milliseconds every century. Scientists say they think the Moon probably has a core that is hot and perhaps partially molten, as is Earth's core. But data from NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft showed in 1999 that the Moon's core is small -- probably between 2 percent and 4 percent of its mass. This is tiny compared with Earth, in which the iron core makes up about 30 percent of the planet's mass. == The History of Dark Energy Goes Way, Way Back Scientists now have evidence that dark energy has been around for most of the universe's history. Using NASAs Hubble Space Telescope, researchers measured the expansion of the universe 9 billion years ago based on 23 of the most distant supernovae ever detected. As theoretically expected, they found that the mysterious antigravity force, apparently pushing galaxies outward at an accelerating pace, was acting on the ancient universe much like the present. All supernovas of a certain variety, called Type-1a, burn with the same brightness, so scientists can calculate relative distances in the universe based on how dim or bright these exploding stars get. In the late 1990s it was realized that these standard candles were dimmer than expected and that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Scientists blamed the acceleration on an inexplicable repulsive force, dark energy. "Although dark energy accounts for more than 70 percent of the energy of the universe, we know very little about it, so each clue is precious," said Adam Riess, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who was involved in the initial discoveries back in the '90s. "Our latest clue is that the stuff we call dark energy was present as long as 9 billion years ago, when it was starting to make its presence felt." The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The researchers believe that although this new observation is a significant clue in the quest to understand what is probably, in Riess's words one of the most, if not the most, pressing question in physics, its far from the proof to what dark energy actually is. Mario Livio from the Space Telescope Science Institute put the situation in perspective at a media teleconference at NASA headquarters today. Water covers 70 percent of the surface of the Earth, Livio said, yet it took humans many centuries to first discover the properties of water. With dark energy, he said, researchers are still in the phase of determining its properties. Previous observations revealed that the early universe was comprised of matter whose gravity was trying to pull it all inward and slow down its expansion. But the spreading out of the cosmos started speeding up around 5 billion to 6 billion years ago. Thats when scientists believe dark energy started to win the cosmic tug of war. "After we subtract the gravity from the known matter in the universe, we can see the dark energy pushing to get out," said Lou Strolger from the University of Western Kentucky. Another important finding, the researchers said, is that they can now compare the properties of ancient stellar explosions to today's explosions. This is important because we use these tools to measure the universe [and] we need to make sure that our understanding of their nature themselves have not changed, Riess said. The chemical composition in these 9-billion-year-old supernovas look remarkably similar to those that occur in the modern universe. So this finding continues to validate the use of supernovas as cosmic probes for understanding the nature of dark energy. This latest finding is consistent with Einsteins explanation for what dark energy is, the researchers noted. Einsteins cosmological constant idea, which he called his biggest blunder and later rejected, turned out to be the same thing that scientist now see as the repulsive form of gravity called dark energy. == Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that dark energy is not a new constituent of space, but rather has been present for most of the universe's history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Investigators used Hubble to find that dark energy was already boosting the expansion rate of the universe as long as nine billion years ago. This picture of dark energy is consistent with Albert Einstein's prediction of nearly a century ago that a repulsive form of gravity emanates from empty space. Data from Hubble provides supporting evidence to help astrophysicists to understand the nature of dark energy. This will allow them to begin ruling out some competing explanations that predict that the strength of dark energy changes over time. Researchers also have found that the class of ancient exploding stars, or supernovae, used to measure the expansion of space today look remarkably similar to those that exploded nine billion years ago and are just now being seen by Hubble. This important finding gives additional credibility to the use of these supernovae for tracking the cosmic expansion over most of the universe's lifetime. Supernovae provide reliable measurements because their intrinsic brightness is well understood. They are therefore reliable distance markers, allowing astronomers to determine how far away they are from Earth. These snapshots, taken by Hubble reveal five supernovae and their host galaxies. The arrows in the top row of images point to the supernovae. The bottom row shows the host galaxies before or after the stars exploded. The supernovae exploded between 3.5 and 10 billion years ago. == The Big Bang is the scientific theory of how the universe emerged from a tremendously dense and hot state about 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang produced about 10 percent He4, .001 percent He3 with almost the rest made up of hydrogen. The universe contains about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium by mass. http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/bang.html == They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A womanfeels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self. Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions. The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other essential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each electrode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the patient was asked to say what she was experiencing. Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences. The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain. There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs, the sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena. "The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence," Dr. Brugger said Scientists have gained new understanding of these odd bodily sensations as they have learned more about how the brain works, Dr. Blanke said. For example, researchers have discovered that some areas of the brain combine information from several senses. Vision, hearing and touch are initially processed in the primary sensory regions. But then they flow together, like tributaries into a river, to create the wholeness of a person's perceptions. A dog is visually recognized far more quickly if it is simultaneously accompanied by the sound of its bark. These multisensory processing regions also build up perceptions of the body as it movesthrough the world, Dr. Blanke said. Sensors in the skin provide information about pressure, pain, heat, cold and similar sensations. Sensors in the joints, tendons and bones tell the brain where the body is positioned in space. Sensors in the ears track the sense of balance. And sensors in the internal organs, including the heart, liver and intestines, provide a readout of a person's emotional state. Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the subjective feelings from the body are also represented in multisensory regions, Dr. Blanke said. And if these regions are directly simulated by an electric current, as in the cases of the two women he studied, the integrity of the sense of body can be altered. As an example, Dr. Blanke described the case of a 22-year-old student who had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain in 2004. "We were checking language areas," Dr. Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense, he said, because the electrode was nowhere near areas involved in the control of movement. Instead, the current was stimulating a multisensory area called the angular gyrus. Dr. Blanke applied the current again. Again, the woman turned her head to the right. "Why are you doing this?" he asked. The woman replied that she had a weird sensation that another person was lying beneath her on the bed. The figure, she said, felt like a "shadow" that did not speak or move; it was young, more like a man than a woman, and it wanted to interfere with her. When Dr. Blanke turned off the current, the woman stopped looking to the right, and said the strange presence had gone away. Each time he reapplied the current, she once again turned her head to try to see the shadow figure. When the woman sat up, leaned forward and hugged her knees, she said that she felt as if the shadow man was also sitting and that he was clasping her in his arms. She said it felt unpleasant. When she held a card in her right hand, she reported that the shadow figure tried to take it from her. "He doesn't want me to read," she said. Because the presence closely mimicked the patient's body posture and position, Dr.Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing. The feeling of a shadowy presence can occur without electrical stimulation to the brain, Dr. Brugger said. It has been described by people who undergo sensory deprivation, as in mountaineers trekking at high altitude or sailors crossing the ocean alone, and by people who have suffered minor strokes or other disruptions in blood flow to the brain. Six years ago, another of Dr. Blanke's patients underwent brain stimulation to a different multisensory area, the angular gyrus, which blends vision with the body sense. The patient experienced a complete out-of-body experience. When the current flowed, she said: "I am at the ceiling. I am looking down at my legs." When the current ceased, she said: "I'm back on the table now. What happened?" Further applications of the current returned the woman to the ceiling, causing her to feel as if she were outside of her body, floating, her legs dangling below her. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs. Because the woman's felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward. == Prof. Stephen Hawking while at Cambridge University in the 1970s, was asked Where did the energy come from for the Big Bang? His answer? He said it is outside the scope of physics. == The existence of the CMB radiation was first predicted by George Gamow in 1948, and by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman in 1950. It was first observed inadvertently in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The radiation was acting as a source of excess noise in a radio receiver they were building. Coincidentally, researchers at nearby Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke and including Dave Wilkinson of the WMAP science team, were devising an experiment to find the CMB. When they heard about the Bell Labs result they immediately realized that the CMB had been found. The result was a pair of papers in the Physical Review: one by Penzias and Wilson detailing the observations, and one by Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson giving the cosmological interpretation. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery. So, the existence of the cosmic background radiation of a particular frequency and intensity was predicted as a corollary of the Big Bang theory. It was then detected by more than one observer, which verified the theory. The Nobel prize committee concurred, so it is now part of the body of accepted physics. == Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, UK, commented: "The demonstration of the perfect blackbody form of the cosmic microwave background spectrum by John Mather and his team, and the detection of fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation by George Smoot and his team, are among the most significant discoveries in astronomy of the past century. "The blackbody form demonstrates the correctness of the Hot Big Bang model, in which matter and radiation were locked together in thermal equilibrium for the first 150,000 years after the initial singularity. == Copernicus Revolution in Science by I. Bernard Cohen (Harvard University Press). In fact De Revolutionibus was printed just before Copernicus died, and he saw the galley print on his deathbed. == Fossilization Let's look first at the composition of bone: it is mostly calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and calcium apatite (a mixed phosphate and carbonate), and a little silicate. When buried for millions of years, and exposed to heat, and hot water solutions that contain small amounts of dissolved iron, manganese, and particularly silicion (as silicates), a very slow replacement and re-deposition process occurs. Everything is slightly soluble, and phosphates slightly more than silicates. The process is abetted when the solution is acidic, as often occurs (owing to sulfides and sulfates), which attacks the carbonate components. It can also be abetted when the solution is highly alkaline, as occurs in sodic solutions, pH>9. The result is gradual transformation of phospho- carbonates with complex silicates, usually related to orthoclases and plagioclases. Electronegativity and solution potentials are important, too. The process is abetted by high pressures--almost always the new crystalline compound has lower molar volume than the original. == Poorly educated people make the language paramount. However, since language is just a tool for describing reality, it is necessarily reality that is paramount. Scientific words should have meanings that accurately reflect reality. Often it happens that reality itself is not precise, as with the concept of species. To give a precise definition of "species" would be to give a definition that did not refer to the actual concept. If the precise definition were adopted and accepted as precise, it would only mislead. Scientific definitions should be clear and unambiguous, but not necessarily precise. We can create definitions of species, but they will "never" reflect exactly what happens in nature. The same is true of innumerable other terms, such as "tree" and "planet" and "white". They work in most cases, but sometimes we need to add qualifiers to clarify that what we are referring to doesn't quite fit cleanly into the category. == Potassium 40 (K40) decays to argon 40, which is an inert gas, or to calcium Potassium is present in most geological materials, making potassium-argon dating highly useful. Potassium is about 1/40 of the earth's crust, and about 1/10,000 of the potassium is potassium 40. Zircons exclude lead, for example, so U-Pb dating can be applied to zircon to determine the time since lava cooled. Micas exclude strontium, so Rb-Sr dating can be used on micas to determine the length of time since the mica formed. == Quantum theory dictates that empty space-what physicists call the pop in and out of existence. This vacuum energy has some subtle but measurable effects. For example, it shifts the energy levels of atoms slightly and exerts a force between closely spaced metal plates (SN: 2/10/01, p. 86). In 1967, the Russian astrophysicist Yakov B. Zeldovich showed that vacuum energy has an intriguing property. The energy associated with this nothingness has negative pressure. The Lamb shift is such a frequency shift effect. That means vacuum energy could push galaxies apart at ever-increasing speeds, making it an ideal candidate for being the dark energy. Alas, there appears to be a huge problem. Calculations reveal that the energy stored in the vacuum is 120 orders of magnitude larger than the dark energy that cosmologists are positing. If the vacuum energy density really is so enormous, it would cause an exponentially rapid expansion of the universe that would rip apart all the electrostatic and nuclear bonds that hold atoms and molecules together, note Paul J. Steinhardt of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Robert R. Caldwell of Dartmouth College in Hanover. It's likely, physicists admit, that they don't really know how to calculate vacuum energy. That complication may have to do with their limited knowledge about the nature of gravity. Einstein's theory holds that gravity curves empty space-the vacuum-but scientists don't yet know how gravity does so on a quantum mechanical scale. Thus, scientists have yet to unify quantum theory with gravity. Some hold out the hope that when they do, they'll miraculously find that the 120 orders of magnitude drop to zero-almost. There might be just enough vacuum energy left over to account for the amount harbored by dark energy. Many researchers think that's a forlorn hope, however. They believe that a better understanding of the vacuum energy will reveal it to be exactly zero. == A PhD student in the University of Adelaide s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences has found evidence of a collision between northern and central Australia 1.64 billion years ago. Kate Selway says that two billion years ago, the Australia we know today existed only in bits. While Africa originally moved to the southeast relative to Europe, it then began to rotate in a more northwest direction. This change probably resulted from the ocean floor spreading in the South Atlantic. At this point spreading in the Tethys either stopped or was outpaced by the spreading of the Atlantic. The African plate continued to rotate counterclockwise until about 70 million years ago. At that point it moved more directly East for a period before moving to the Northwest for the remainder of the Tertiary. During this time the Tethys was closed and the geologic units described above were compressed, uplifted and exposed. == "Calculations show that a meteorite with a diameter of 30 m, weighing about 300,000 tons, traveling at a velocity of 15 km/sec (33,500 miles/hour) would release energy equivalent to about 20 million tons of TNT. Such a meteorite struck at Meteor Crater, Arizona (the Barringer Crater) about 49,000 years ago leaving a crater 1200 m in diameter and 200 m deep. The amount of energy released by an impact depends on the size of the impacting body and its velocity. An impact like the one that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico about 65 million years ago, thought responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and numerous other species, created the Chicxulub Crater, 180 km in diameter and released energy equivalent to about 100 million megatons of TNT. For comparison, the amount of energy needed to create a nuclear winter on the Earth as a result of nuclear war is about 8,000 megatons, and the energy equivalent of the world's nuclear arsenal is about 60,000 megatons." (Meteorites, Impact and Mass Extinction). == The Moon's width, 2,159 miles, is about 2.5 miles greater than its pole-to-pole height it was still greater than would be expected for its current rotation period of 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds. == Antarctic crater linked to ancient die-off Scientists say impact might have caused extinction 250 million years ago An apparent crater as big as Ohio has been found in Antarctica. Scientists think it was carved by a space rock that caused the greatest mass extinction on Earth, 250 million years ago. The crater, buried beneath a half-mile (1 kilometer) of ice and discovered by some serious airborne and satellite sleuthing, is more than twice as big as the one involved in the demise of the dinosaurs. The crater's location, in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia, suggests it might have instigated the breakup of the so-called Gondwana supercontinent, which pushed Australia northward, the researchers said. This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time, said Ralph von Frese, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University. The crater is about 300 miles (500 kilometers) wide. It was found by looking at differences in density that show up in gravity measurements taken with NASA's GRACE satellites. Researchers spotted a mass concentration, which they call a mascon dense stuff that welled up from the mantle, likely in an impact. If I saw this same mascon signal on the moon, I'd expect to see a crater around it, Frese said. (The moon, with no atmosphere, retains a record of ancient impacts in the visible craters there.) So Frese and colleagues overlaid data from airborne radar images that showed a 300-mile-wide subsurface, circular ridge. The mascon fit neatly inside the circle. And when we looked at the ice-probing airborne radar, there it was, he said Thursday. The Permian-Triassic extinction, as it is known, wiped out most life on land and in the oceans. Researchers have long suspected a space rock might have been involved. Some scientists have blamed volcanic activity or other culprits. The die-off set up conditions that eventually allowed dinosaurs to rule the planet. The newfound crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, which marks the impact that may have ultimately killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub space rock is thought to have been 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide, while the Wilkes Land meteor could have been up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide, the researchers said. == http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/index.html astronomy == Blob biggest thing in universe An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say. The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea. The galaxies within the newly found structure are packed together four times closer than the universe's average. Some of the gas bubbles are up to 400,000 light years across, nearly twice the diameter of our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. Scientists think they formed when massive stars born early in the history of the universe exploded as supernovas and blew out their surrounding gases. Another theory is that the bubbles are giant gas cocoons that will one day give birth to new galaxies. The finding will give researchers new insight into what the structure of cosmos looks like at the largest scale. "Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said study team member Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University. "The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies," Yamauchi said. == Grand Canyon Consider that by the late 1800s geologists were beginning to realize that the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon had been blocked several times and at several locations by lava dams that were built when local volcanoes spewed their molten lava into the developing canyon. Of course, being uniformitarian in their thinking, these earlier geologists theorized that these lava dams were each slowly worn away in sequences of tens of thousands of years as water flowed over them during a total course of around 5.5 million years. For a long time now this position has been the prevailing opinion of the geological community and of scientists in general. Interestingly enough though, this long cherished uniformitarian concept has been recently challenged by modern geologists who are presenting evidence that these lava dams did not erode away slowly at all. Instead, mounting evidence suggests that these lava dams failed almost instantaneously in catastrophic events of staggering proportions. Modern geologists are now theorizing that the sudden failure of these dams released raging torrents of water carrying up to "37 times" more water than the largest ever recorded flooding of the mighty Mississippi River. Of course, the reason that such massive amounts of water could be stored and released so quickly is partially due to the fact that some of the dams were very large, rising up to 2,000 feet above the river bed. It seems that some of these larger dams lasted just long enough for very large amounts of water to build up behind them. The formation of very large lakes behind some of these dams seems to have proceeded at a very rapid rate since there is no evidence of lakes existing in the region beyond very short periods of time. Then, with the sudden failure of a 2,000-foot dam, a huge wall of rapidly rushing water charged through the Canyon carving out significant portions of the Canyon in very short order. But, why did these dams fail so quickly? As it turns out, lava dams are inherently unstable. This is because when molten lava meets cold river water it cools very rapidly. This rapid cooling effect turns the lava into fragile walls of glass. As this glass is cooled and heated it fractures quickly and easily, sometimes \explosively\. Not all that surprisingly then, recent evidence seems to suggest that many of the dams failed from the bottom up since the glass content was greatest at the base of the dams. Also, various fault lines run through the Grand Canyon. Active earthquakes were thought to affect the Grand Canyon region during the time of the various lava flows. It seems then that with the help of even minor earthquakes fragile dams with glass bases supporting the enormous pressure of very large lakes would indeed fail in a catastrophic manner in very short order. Such a massive and sudden release of water would obviously result in very rapid erosion. In fact, growing numbers of geologists now believe that certain portions of the Grand Canyon, once thought to be up to 5 million years old (Marble Canyon and the Inner Gorge), may be as young as 600,000 years old. Talk about getting younger with time! An 8-fold decrease in supposed age is a very dramatic reduction. How could geologists have been so far off in their dating techniques? Some mainstream geologists are even starting to refer to the Grand Canyon as a \geologic infant.\ This is especially interesting because the initial estimates were supposedly backed up by fairly reliable potassium-argon (K-Ar) radiometric dating techniques, which are now thought by some to be inaccurate in this region due to the lack of complete removal of the argon daughter product at the time of initial formation of the lava dams. Further evidence for a catastrophic model comes from USGS scientist and University of Arizona (UA) graduate, Jim O'Conner, along with UA hydrologist Victor Baker and others, who found evidence of a \400,000 cfs [cubic feet per second] flow that occurred about 4,000 years ago.\ For comparison, this is about the rate of catastrophic flow that would result if the Glen Canyon Dam suddenly failed. Taking this into account, scientists have noted that, \Large sustained floods can cause rapid downcutting in bedrock. The Inner Gorge and Marble Canyon are essentially giant slot canyons: features consistent with rapid down-cutting.\ Also, when large dams fail catastrophically, such as Idaho's Teton Dam did in 1976, they leave distinctive profiles in soils and on canyon walls. The water drops quickly with an exponential decay curve. Such decay curves are clearly evident in the Grand Canyon. For this sort of catastrophe to happen the lava dams must have failed almost instantaneously - as did the Teton dam, which failed and was completely destroyed in less than 2 hours. Because the Grand Canyon lava dams were so unstable, the lakes that formed behind these dams did not have very much time to develop. In fact, the evidence clearly shows that these lakes must have filled fairly quickly before they were drained catastrophically a short time later. Though these lakes were sometimes very large when they emptied, they did not leave evidence of significant deltas or expected sedimentation, which would have developed if these lakes had survived longer than tens of years to a few hundred years. Another interesting finding comes from the fieldwork of Webb, an adjunct faculty member of the University of Arizona department of geosciences, hydrology and water resources. With co-researchers Fenton and Cerling, Webb applied a newly developed \cosmogenic dating method\, developed by Cerling, to date basalt flows and other landforms in the Grand Canyon. The technique measures how long a surface has been exposed to cosmic rays from space. Their application